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Killer 2
Transcript 2 Fate must have lent itself to me, as I'm not often found reading The Daily, but I picked up in between classes so something other than my growing hunger might accompany me on the bus ride home. It's usually esoteric garbage punctuated by mildly interesting articles on popular science, but one editorial stood out. The voice was fluid and leisurely, an above all, honest. It read like prose poetry, and had it spoken on the subject of sewage treatment I would have been equally enthralled. It was actually about literacy rates in Brasilia shanty towns, a topic I cared very little about until I read the name printed in by-line italics beneath the title: Olivia Riberio. Certainty was not instant as it had been the first time. Perfection requires more vetting than mediocrity. Thankfully, Olivia had made herself something of a public figure on campus. A simple rifle through back-issues of The Daily revealed in her a warmth of character that I had known only once before. Her previous editorials were similarly altruistic in nature to the first I had read, nd I could track the development of her prose through time. Her passion for language was likely the first nail in her coffin. The second was how she used it. Elise would have been a journalist, too. I watched her for weeks to be sure, but in hindsight I am certain of the moment I knew. It was nearly a fortnight after I discovered the first article and I was trailing her home from the gym she visited daily. An inky dusk had settled over us, obscuring my already shadowed form from view. The swollen air was somehow soothing, allowing me to all but forget the hollow pang in my gut, and actually bother toworry about an unfinished painting due the following day. I let my mind idle, and had it not been for an angry driver honking at my negligence as I jaywalked to keep to keep up with my target, I might not have witnessed that moment that truly transcended time. A prunish homeless man huddled next to the stoop of her building, which by then I was fairly familiar with. I hadn't seen him there before; surrounded as he was with the detritus of his meager life, he would have been difficult to overlook. She was about to pass him by when a calloused hand reached out from beneath his pile of soiled blankets, grasping at nothing, and a windy groan escaped him. She paused. It was after she fished the loose change from her pockets and deposited it in the dog bowl next to his heaping nest that I saw it. She bent down before the man, grasping his weary hand in her own, and became Elise. My sister's features gleamed through Olivia's skin and the light from a spring day that lives vividly in my memory cast them both in silhouette. It lasted mere moments, but I still see it every time I blink. It seems insane to think I waited so long after witnessing such a sign. It should have been so obvious.